MIT xPRO | Bootcamps

I’ve been taking the online machine learning course by MIT, and it’s been an incredibly structured and rewarding experience. The course is well-organized, making complex concepts easier to grasp. The assignments are challenging but push me to apply what I’ve learned in meaningful ways, which has significantly deepened my understanding of the subject. I’ve gained a tremendous amount of knowledge so far, and I would highly recommend this course to anyone serious about diving into machine learning.

The No-Code AI and Machine Learning course offered by GreatLearning has been a game-changer for me. The course is meticulously structured to break down advanced AI concepts into easily digestible content, regardless of your technical background. The hands-on projects using no-code platforms were particularly impactful, allowing me to create real-world AI models with confidence and ease.The instructors are not only experts in their field but also excellent at conveying complex ideas in an understandable way. The course also fosters a strong sense of community, with valuable interactions and prompt support from peers and mentors alike. This course is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to gain practical AI skills without needing to code.

 The overall experience of the program is very informative and enriching. The program design, which includes both live and recorded lectures, provides a perfect blend of scheduled interactive sessions and self-paced learning.

The program starts with basic introductory topics and gradually progresses to more advanced concepts, ensuring a smooth learning curve. Learners are well-supported with access to lectures, professors, and program managers, making it easier to get help and clarification when needed.

One of the key strengths of the program is its flexibility. It is well-suited for both full-time and part-time professionals, thanks to the availability of recorded lectures and the adaptable schedule for assignments. This design allows learners to manage their studies alongside their professional commitments effectively.

Overall, the program is thoughtfully designed to cater to various learning needs, making it a valuable educational experience for anyone interested.

This course is finely curated by MIT professors, and the way the mentors delivered it was well taken by all students and made the course very interactive. The case studies delved into Hypothesis Testing, Recommendation Systems, Networking and Graphical Models were the best part of understanding how the classical methods are applied using modern techniques.
Assignments, Q&A sessions and test projects are the best of this course to keep you aligned with the progress.
I certainly recommend this course for anyone interested in embracing these subjects which are applied in most fields in today's world.

The MIT Professional Education's Applied Data Science Program proved to be an intensive yet fulfilling journey. The structured curriculum, encompassing Python, statistics, machine learning, and deep learning, provided a robust foundation and advanced knowledge in key areas of data science. Janvi, our Program Manager, was particularly instrumental in guiding us through the program, offering personalized feedback and support that greatly enhanced the learning experience. The Capstone project was a highlight, allowing for practical application of the concepts learned. While the pace was challenging, the educational payoff was significant. The only drawback was the compact schedule, which demanded a high level of commitment and time management to keep up with the rigorous coursework and project deadlines.

The course provided an excellent introduction to AIML and covered essential core concepts. Coverage around use of available no-code tools to implement such concepts augmented the learning experience. A variety of course materials were provided, which are all very helpful. At time of registration, the impression shared was that the course time is 10-12 hrs. / week. However, I felt more time commitment was needed.  It would be beneficial to allow students to download the video sessions as there're valuable explanations that are not all obtained via the slides and other course material. It is important to set expectations with students that topic specific course material should be reviewed prior to the mentor sessions so that the mentor sessions can be more productive with better discussions.

I decided to upskill by taking a class in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The class offered by Great Learning through MIT provided exactly what I was looking for in a class had the depth and content that I was looking for. The curriculum in this class covers the underlying data science, introduces students to appropriate tools and guides participants on how to apply these concepts in a business setting. The content, platform and delivery are very well structured, and the instructors are quite knowledgeable. The learning environment in Saturday sessions is quite collaborative and provides a good forum for asking questions. I would highly recommend this course and Great Learning to anyone. 

Enrolling in the Applied Data Science Program at MIT was one of the best decisions I've ever made. The curriculum was well-structured, and the instructors had an exceptional knack for breaking down complex concepts into understandable chunks. What truly amazed me was the emphasis on real-world projects. These projects not only allowed us to apply our learning but also exposed us to the challenges one might face in a professional setting. Shikha, our Project Manager, was an integral part of this journey. Her unwavering support, organization, and ability to keep our team on track were instrumental in the success of our project. The collaboration with Shikha made the learning experience even more enriching. I feel more confident than ever in my data science skills, and I owe a significant part of that to this program. Thank you!!!!

I cannot express enough how truly outstanding Priyanka's guidance was throughout the 'No Code AI Certification' course at MIT. Her profound and comprehensive understanding of the subject matter was absolutely clear and she consistently made herself available to address any queries and provide in-depth explanations. Her genuine and heartfelt concern for our academic progress and personal growth was palpable, creating an enriching and supportive learning environment. She went above and beyond to ensure we had a thorough understanding of the course material, making the learning journey not just educational, but also incredibly enjoyable. I wholeheartedly recommend her and this course!

I entered this program with very little background in python or data science and through the process of 12 weeks I now have a broad understanding data science.  This program and the culminating capstone helped verify that this is my career of choice.  The program manager Nitish made every effort to contact me when I feel behind on projects or neared a deadline. Any questions I had were answered within hours. Coding feedback was provided along with ample resources for self study and networking. The great learning community also provided an active alumni presence to address questions or concerns

This course only touches the basics of Cybersecurity which are things you can learn on YouTube for free. It was informative and gives you a slight idea of what different careers in cybersecurity would be like but definitely not worth the price. Their brochure states that it gives "foundational cybersecurity knowledge" and that is NOT a lie. Do not waste your money thinking you will come out ready to hit the ground running. The career prep could not be taken seriously in my opinion as they have you put skills on your resume that you have heard of in their course, but are not competent in at all. The MIT instructors are great as well as the Emeritus instructors, but please do not waste your money on this if you are completely new to cybersecurity and hoping to make a career change. You will still have so much to learn after the program is over that you will feel like you wasted your time and money that could have went to a bootcamp with more hands on experience instead of endless discussion boards. 

MIT xPRO's full stack coding bootcamp is offered by Emeritus and covers the MERN stack.  The first trimester includes the fundamentals of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.  This is taught through code-along videos, articles, discussion boards, and coding assignments using the NextTech platform. This trimester concludes with your portfolio project and three mini-projects

The second trimester covers React as the frontend library for this course.  The second trimester concludes with a frontend bank application.  The final trimester covers the backend and concludes with a full stack project using Node, Express, and MongoDB.

So , I have read some of the reviews, that this coding bootcamp isn't bad. It's true the bootcamp is not bad, but it's not good for beginners. For those who have previous coding knowledge this is a perfect course. But if you are brand new to coding and maybe know a few random basics, I would NOT recommend this course under any circumstances. Please trust me and don't waste your money. MIT Pro partnered with Emeritus to provide the courses, but it's largely poorly supported, I joined the Women's Professional Certificate in Coding, but we only had one support instructor, all the videos were recordings, but they did not prepare you for the exercises, the NextTech Assignments were often buggy and did not explain what the user did incorrectly. The videos "taught" by two professors were not applicable in some sense. When you're new to coding, you have to make the content engaging, recycling content recorded from years back and just slapping the name "Women's Cohort" is not helpful. Another sad aspect is they promised that this course was excellent for the working women, when in fact that was a lie! There are assignments due every Thursday, which is not conducive to a Part-time schedule, it was more like Full Time. If you work full-time, you may want to take this into consideration because the content is a lot to go through, the course having assignments due every other week would have made more sense. Overall, it just seemed like a highly processed way of trying to get women into coding, without a true support system. I really did intently try to be in this course because I want to learn coding, I really do, but I did not appreciate the curriculum, structure and lack of support. The one support instructor she did try, but for a course you need more than one support instructor. So for anyone who is NOT a beginner , please feel free to enroll, as you will likely do fine. For all the beginners you know what I mean. Try other courses and programs - Scrimba, SheCodes, etc. TRUST ME, you will save yourself money and time. I wasted money just to find out that this was not for me. Very disappointing. Not every "online course/workshop" is built the same so do be careful. They can make almost $7000 from you by using previously recorded content and a poor support system. The money isn't my issue, because if it was a good course, I would rave about it. The issue is the content was so poor,  the course out dated in many respects and not at all built out for the beginner. 

To get a better idea of the current situation of this Bootcamp click the box to read the reviews of MIT XPro Bootcamp by "most recent first." You will notice that most of the bad reviews are recent. There is a reason for this. I am about 2 months away from finishing this slog of a Bootcamp. Here is my experience:

Prior to enrolling in the MIT xPro Bootcamp, I had taken a coding bootcamp with SheCodes (highly recommended). With SheCodes, I learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, responsive development, and React. Enough to start freelancing as a web developer. I should have just taken what I learned with SheCodes and made projects and a portfolio and started applying for jobs. But, instead, I thought I needed a "full-stack" experience and I trusted MIT to deliver that.

Both SheCodes and MIT are pre-recorded video lessons with help available via Slack (SheCodes), a forum (MIT), or email (both). The differences are that MIT is a graded course and is structured more like an online college class. New work is released every week and you have one week to finish it and turn it in for grading. You cannot make up late work. There is no feedback provided for your weekly work. Most of the work is on a sandbox platform NextTech which has its share of issues and is notorious for having bugs and rejecting good code and passing bad code. Because of this, you had no idea if what you turned in was actually good or not (no feedback). The only feedback you receive is for your portfolio projects (there are 3 of these) and this is the one (and only) strong part of the course.

SheCodes on the other hand had soft deadlines. You could finish work on your own time, but you could get extensions if you needed them. You received feedback on your work and if you did a good job, you passed on to the next portion of the class. No grades and lots of support. You leave SheCodes with some great projects for your portfolio. So in a way, MIT and SheCodes are similar...pre-recorded video, independent learning, making projects for your portfolio. Looking back, I learned much better with the SheCodes method and I would have saved thousands of dollars if I hadn't been so sold on the idea of moving on to a full-stack bootcamp with the MIT name. Having had a great experience with SheCodes, I was shocked at how poorly the MIT course was put together.

Here is where the MIT course gets VERY stressful. Because work is graded (you must achieve 75% to pass the course and receive a certificate) and there is a hard due date, you are dependent on timely support to learn the material and turn it in on time. This makes the performance of your official "learning facilitator" extremely vital. Your learning facilitator is the ONLY actual live human who helps you during this course. The MIT professors show up on pre-recorded videos only. There are other people who are "support" staff available via email but they often just refer you back to your learning facilitator. The week's graded work comes out on a Thursday. Our learning facilitator was only available to meet us live online on Tuesdays. The work is due Thursday morning. So...if you struggled with any part of the course, you only had a day and a half to get help and then hopefully complete your assignments correctly and turn them in. If you missed the live help (office hours) then you had to wait for the recording to be posted which usually happened the next day (giving you less than a day to finish all of your work). And there was a lot of graded work. Way too much to do in one full day. Hope you don't work on Wednesdays! You'll need that whole day to do a week's worth of work.

Well...that's stressful. But, wait there's more...

This is where it is important to note that most of the poor reviews of this bootcamp are from the most recent cohorts. The main reason for this is that most of the pre-recorded content of the class (the part with the MIT professors) is now outdated. As the course itself states "software changes rapidly" and in the last two segments of the course, you can count on most of the instruction to be almost useless since all the steps they are demonstrating no longer work. The frustrating part of this however is that you have no idea whether your code isn't working because of a small error on your part or because they are having you code with outdated methods. You will spend countless hours trying to figure out if it is you or the course. Then Tuesday will roll around and you will finally get your answer that "oops, that instruction is outdated" and by then you will only have one and a half days to do it all over again with the proper instruction and turn it in for grading.

The career support is just a series of pre-recorded videos about making your resume and portfolio. Nothing that you can't find for free on YouTube. In my own experience, I wouldn't have passed this class (due to the issues stated above) if I hadn't already taken the SheCodes courses and knew my way around Google and YouTube to find free content. 

In the end, having the MIT name on my CV will be a nice parting gift, but if I had to do it again, I would not pay nearly $7k for this poorly designed and delivered course. I am a former teacher and there are so many ways this course has failed basic instructional design and pedagogy methods. Save yourself lots of money and look into Nucamp or SheCodes. I have a feeling that most of these college-affiliated courses are the same. And your experience and success in them will be entirely dependent on that one human who is employed to actually help you learn.

If the content of the MIT course was up to date, then we could have handled a poor support system. If the support system was robust and available when we needed it, then we could have handled out-of-date content. But, give us out-of-date material and poor support, and you have 32 weeks of frustration, little learning, and the MIT course in a nutshell. 

Currently about 7 weeks in and I have to say this is not very beginner friendly at all. I wouldn't believe anything the student advisors tell you about this course either as they just want to sign up as many people as possible. It is all videos that basically tell you what to do and not how. You are supposed to figure out how to code on your own basically and complete the assignments, so I don't know why they think they can charge so much for this course. It is obvious the only people in my group that are successful have at least some background in computer science or coding.  The learning facilitators have been very helpful but there is only 1-2 hours of office hours a week where you can ask questions, you can not contact the actual professors from the videos at all. They recommend you take a free intro to javascript course before it starts and if you don't I have a hard time seeing anyone being able to get through this course with out some basics on your own. 

This program is one of most ineffective learning experiences I’ve ever had. As a long-time educator and curriculum developer, I’ve reached the conclusion that there had been little to no thought towards healthy pedagogy or scope and sequence. Many of the materials such as video tutorials are years-back outdated and, so, students run into multiple errors trying to figure them out. There is virtually no consistent support other than reaching out to other peers all the time. Limited learning. Do NOT fall for the name! Not worth it!